Oakland A's headed to Las Vegas

Sacramento's average daily high in July and August is pretty damn close -- above 90 degrees nearly every day and streaks of 100s -- but "usually" the temperature drops some once the sun sets and the Delta wind blows through the Carquinez Strait. However, I remember plenty of nights when Mother Nature's air conditioning was on the fritz.

Don't let anybody fool you into thinking you don't need central AC in northern California, unless you're in Eureka, Point Reyes or Half Moon Bay.

Having said that, I'm not sure St. Louis weather isn't the worst in the bigs for summer swelter.

 

Having spent 5 yrs in Sac it’s nowhere close to CHI summer. (I had car w/o AC too)

 

Sure, you can get on and off the highway to avoid tolls, but you’ll add lots of extra time onto the trip.

 

I think Richmond has a ballpark deal in place, at the same site as The Diamond.

 

Giants won the series in ‘54, so they were three years removed from a WS title. Stoneham was looking to move the team anyways to Minneapolis as he owned the minor league team there and Metropolitan Stadium was being built. NYC could no longer support three major league teams, Giants were the third wheel and Giants and Dodgers both were in 40+ year old ballparks that had seen better days. It was pretty understandable that the Giants were going to have to move.

Dodgers, of course, were a different matter. O’Malley wanted to pay for and build his own stadium, which of course is much different than owners today. But he couldn’t convince Robert Moses to allow the city to take over the land that he wanted and sell it to him.

 

What the Bay Area needed to do, was create a "metro authority" similar to what the Phoenix area did, to tax hotel rooms and visitors, which the area gets a lot of - to fund stadiums. That's what Vegas does, the Phoenix area did it to fund spring training sites etc. Maybe then the 49ers would still be in SF and the A's and Raiders in Oakland.

 

In his latest missive, Joe Sheehan obliterated Fisher and predicts the A's will be in Sacramento longer than three years.

 

Taxes! Why didn't California think of that before?!?!

 

That's probably a major reason.

 

That's why Oak was pitching a tough line in last negotiations, A's yearly TV deal is worth $67M/yr but only if they were in Oakland. They go to LV, lose that $$. Sacramento? Probably a reduced amount.

Fisher is worth $4B, has seen his team value go from $200M to $1.2B and he STILL refuses to spend any $$ (he gets by all these years because he's getting that revenue sharing$$). Never been an A's fan but damn I feel for my fellow BB fans here in the Bay Area who root/rooted for the A's.

 

Taxes on visitors - the locals don't feel the pinch. Of course, with BART, the need for a rental car is reduced.

 

a) San Francisco already has a 14% hotel tax.

b) If you are going to increase the amount of tax money coming in -- hotel tax, whatever -- how many citizens want to see that money going to a new ballpark in Oakland? I suspect the answer is very, very few.